Monthly Archives: January 2007

I haven’t written about this for the same reason I don’t write about a lot of things: everybody else is. Digby‘s been all over this, for one (here and here and here and here, and most recently, here, among other posts). I’m not going to write about it now, either, but I did want to point you to an eyewitness account that confirms much of what Digby has been observing/guessing and makes it even harder – almost impossible, in fact – to believe Sparling’s story is true.

Writing at Norwegianity, guest poster MNObserver’s daughter was present at the march and provides “I was there” information about the physical set-up. MNO concludes:

So we have a suspicious claim of spitting – told in increasingly inconsistent stories as time goes on – from a man who feels it’s just fine to hang those who oppose his viewpoints in effigy as traitors given all manner of credence. And our “liberal media” continues to do it, day in and day out.

(Post corrected due to unexplainable stupidity of author who apparently no longer knows how to read.)

Although that dread word “anti-trust” has not yet been spoken aloud, in public, the feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions since 2001 that has resulted in fewer and fewer corporations owning more and more of the economy, along with the recent return to power of Democrats and the rage building up around CEO salaries, has made it all but inevitable that at some point it will raise its insidious little head. This will not, of course, come from the Bush Administration, where their attitude is and has been right along: “Go to it, boys. Our heads are turned.” (Will Rogers on the Hoover Administration)

Just to take a single example, our entire media apparatus, which was in the hands of fewer than 20 giant corporations when Bush came to office – bad enough, you’d think – is now in the hands of a mere half-dozen thanks to Michael Powell’s obedient, not to say obsequious, FCC.

But uttered or not, the specter of potential regulation and/or legal proceedings designed to weaken or even break up these near-monopolies a la AT&T or Microsoft in Europe sends shivers of fear down the spines of corporate owners everywhere. Even worse, Barney Frank is – or soon will be – holding hearings to look at whether investors should have more say over the pay packages Boards offer their major executives. Maybe even give them veto power.

Yes, things could get ugly on The Street in a few years, and even uglier in the executive suites next door.

The sometimes staggering greed of corporate America is matched only by its affection for simple solutions to complex problems. Bloomberg.com offers a perspective on energy policy that you may have missed.

President George W. Bush used his State of the Union address to lay out an ambitious energy policy that significantly expands a number of existing programs. The centerpiece of his plan will increase our reliance on biofuels by a factor of five. In other words, he announced a policy that makes no sense whatsoever.

Of all of the embarrassing corners of government policy, our approach to energy may be the most shamefully indefensible. And now the indefensible is going to get bigger.

Diane at the Mass blog ToughEnough isn’t. She’s taking John Kerry’s recent withdrawl from the 2008 campaign pretty hard. She says she’s “in mourning” and that it was “a painful day”. Coming from a hard-core Kerry partisan, such feelings are certainly understandable, but frankly, the rest of us are heaving long sighs of relief. Diane doesn’t get it.

The venom that’s poured out of the left and the right towards Kerry in the past few days have convinced me that he made the right decision. It’s been staggering, the amount of bile still held in reserve for him. Only imagine if he’d announced he was running. Someday I hope to nail down for myself the source of all the fury this one man evokes.

Maybe I can help clear up some of your confusion, Diane. I don’t suppose the hatred of Kerry by the Right is what’s bothering you – the answers to that are obvious enough – so I’ll concentrate on the left. Continue reading →

A recent post at Paperwight’s Fair Shot reminded me that I’ve been noticing there are a lot of folks in Left Blogtopia who continue to be surprised upon discovering that conservative Republicans seem to define some words quite differently from the way we define them. After quoting Rod Dreher’s recent confession –

I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.

– Paperwight has some difficulty trying to figure out just which conservative “philosophy” Rod’s brand would have fit into. He finally concludes:

The only form of conservatism that allows one to actually have that belief is authoritarianism, whether it’s royalist, theocratic, fascist, or otherwise dictatorial. Authoritarianism lets you just turn off your brain when your leaders speak, because your leaders can’t do bad things. And that in a nutshell is one of the central features of and problems with American conservatism.

Well…YES. And it has been since Nixon’s resident PR assassin, Roger Ailes, found that he could blunt criticism by simply changing the words Nixon used, particularly about Viet Nam. The invasion and bombing campaign in Cambodia became an incursion, cover-ups became protecting executive privilege, and an illegal domestic black bag operation ordered directly by Tricky Dick became a rogue operation Nixon didn’t know about because of something called plausible deniability.

But the capper was the concept of the imperial presidency – the so-called “unitary executive” – developed by Ailes and John Mitchell, who “interpreted” the Constitution by throwing out the separation of powers clause and assuming for the president the power to do anything. As the late Howard Hunt, boss of the Watergate break-in, put it:

“I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land,” he told People magazine back in 1974.

Later on, the late, great Lee Atwater expanded Ailes’ original contribution by inventing “spin” and, more significantly, “reverse spin” – the art of convincing the press that a war-like statement was really about peace and a peaceful statement was really advocating war, that racism was merely a response to runaway affirmative action and affirmative action was really racist, and so on. The definitions Atwater came up with for his legendary reverse spin sessions were so attractive to radical conservatives that over the next quarter-century they first absorbed, then processed, then began to actually believe in the invented black-is-white, day-is-night definitions as if they were the real ones.

Of course, that explains only about half of the terms conservatives use. The rest come from deep disconnections inherent in conservative Republican dogma between what they wish were true and what actually is true. In fact, the essence of conservatism is, as Paperwight finally noticed, anti-democratic, authoritarian, demagogic, anti-Constitutional, and anti-American to an alarming degree. Which means that conservative Republicanism attracts demagogues, imperialists, monarchists, and would-be dictators like a dogpile attracts flies.

So I thought it might help if someone compiled a dictionary of Conservative RepublicanSpeak one could refer to if one was unsure how a Republican was defining a particular word or phrase s/he’d just used. Which is all a long-winded way of introducing (apologies to Ambrose Bierce) the first installment of:

Genarlow Wilson is standing on a threshold all right, at the end of the last hall of Burruss Correctional Training Center, an hour and a half south of Atlanta. He’s just a few feet from the mechanical door that closes with a goosebump-raising whurr and clang. Three and a half years after he received that letter, he’s wearing a blue jacket with big, white block letters. They read: STATE PRISONER.

He’s 20 now. Just two years into a 10-year sentence without possibility of parole, he peers through the thick glass and bars, trying to catch a glimpse of freedom. Outside, guard towers and rolls of coiled barbed wire remind him of who he is.

Once, he was the homecoming king at Douglas County High. Now he’s Georgia inmate No. 1187055, convicted of aggravated child molestation.

When he was a senior in high school, he received oral sex from a 10th grader. He was 17. She was 15. Everyone, including the girl and the prosecution, agreed she initiated the act. But because of an archaic Georgia law, it was a misdemeanor for teenagers less than three years apart to have sexual intercourse, but a felony for the same kids to have oral sex.

Afterward, the state legislature changed the law to include an oral sex clause, but that doesn’t help Wilson. In yet another baffling twist, the law was written to not apply to cases retroactively, though another legislative solution might be in the works. The case has drawn national condemnation, from the “Free Genarlow Wilson Now” editorial in The New York Times to a feature on Mark Cuban’s HDNet.

“It’s disgusting,” Cuban wrote to ESPN in an e-mail. “I can not see any way, shape or form that the interests of the state of Georgia are served by throwing away Genarlow’s youth and opportunity to become a vibrant contributor to the state. All his situation does is reinforce some unfortunate stereotypes that the state is backward and misgoverned. No one with a conscience can look at this case and conclude that justice has been served.”

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort. Continue reading →